Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re: Facebook hurts the Internet (Score 2) 141

Because I don't want to be the weird guy who insists using e-mail for communications. I would just be an endurance to everyone.

Funny. In my circle of friends, anybody who would insist on communicating only via Facebook would be the "weird guy" (actually, as far as I know, most of them do not even have a Facebook account, specifically because of privacy concerns). We communicate via e-mail, or, if we need to talk to someone Right Now, via telephone. It works, try it.

Comment Re:watch this (Score 1) 275

and also, this https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

We have never put, nor returned, a man, to or from, the moon. And we are not the only ones to have faked space exploration. We did not have the technology to do it then, much like we don't now.

All three videos you posted just regurgigate the same old hoax arguments which have been debunked countless times. For good examples of the debunking, just go to e.g. http://www.clavius.org/index.h... or watch any of the videos (on youtube) by e.g. Phil Plait / astrobrant2 / GreaterSapien (or any of the countless others). Don't even mention Jarrah White, watch the astrobrant2 videos for debunking of his crazy theories.

Also good: Neil deGrasse Tyson discusses (among other stuff) the moon landing hoax with Joe Rogan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Comment Re:There are numerous other obvious flaws (Score 1) 275

Whenever people talk about "the fake moon landing", I like to point them to one of the many youtube videos which explain how DIFFICULT it would have been to fake the moon landing, like this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... It actually would have been easier to just send people to the moon instead of faking it.

Comment Re:it's means it is (Score 1) 132

Looks like it only 40 parts (including engine, electronics, etc). The video of driving car is only 40 parts. Did you see they printed most of the car in one pass as a single part?

So you say a car engine is made out of only 40 parts? Looked like more parts to me last time I looked under the hood of my car.

Transportation

Technological Solution For Texting While Driving Struggles For Traction 326

An anonymous reader writes: While legislators and police try to tackle the epidemic of distracted driving through education, regulation, and enforcement, Scott Tibbitts is trying to solve it through engineering. He developed a small device which, when plugged into a vehicle, would determine which phone belonged to the driver and shut off its texting and voice call capabilities. "The telematics box sends a wireless message that the car is moving. The phone sends its own message about its location. Both sets of information — from the car and phone — are sent to Katasi's servers. Then, an algorithm weighs the incoming data with other information, like the location of the phones belonging to all the people who drive the car and the starting point of the trip; if the trip starts at Junior's high school, and mom and dad's phones are at work, the driver has been identified — Junior is driving."

The problem is that Tibbitts can't get anyone interested in setting up a system to make these devices ubiquitous. Consumers can't be sold on such a product: all evidence suggests people are increasingly unwilling to be cut off from constant communication. So, he tried working with carriers. Sprint partnered with Tibbitts long enough to test the device, but they were afraid of the legal risks involved. Now, Tibbitts is nursing the technology along, looking for a way to get it into cars and make people safer.
Facebook

Facebook's Auto-Play Videos Chew Up Expensive Data Plans 108

Another good reason to be annoyed by autoplaying videos online: it eats up dataplan allowances, making for some rude surprises. I'm always nervous about data allowances, and sites should be cautious about what they shove at you; turning off the autoplay feature isn't hard (and it's explained in the second article linked above), but I sure wish it was the default setting, or at least caught and handled by a browser extension. (Perhaps this is a job for Social Fixer's next iteration.) Is Facebook the worst offender on this front?

Comment Re:"they shouldn't email you?" (Score 1) 232

I really wouldn't want E-mail deleted while I'm out of office. Just the fact that I would have to ask everyone who E-mailed me to resend.

The expectation is that the sender reads the automatic reply, which says something like "X is on vacation and cannot be reached, so your mail will be deleted. If it was about something important, please mail Y". So you should not have to ask people to resend the mail, because they either wait for you to come back, or send a mail to your colleagues who are not on vacation (and if it is was something private like "want to go see a movie tonight?", people surely know your private email/phone number, too).

Comment Re:"they shouldn't email you?" (Score 3, Interesting) 232

I've never interpreted these auto-replies to mean that I shouldn't send mail to that address. I thought they're just courtesy replies from a robot explaining that it'll be a long time before anyone reads it.

Deleting the email seems like a bad idea. That'll keep the recipient from being able to read it when they return.

And WTF does this have to do with overtime?

In theory you could just let the emails sit there until you are back at work, but in practice sadly it is often expected that you check your email inbox every now and then. Employees often feel that they can't say "no" to the expectation that they have to be available via email even while at home off work hours. To protect employees (because vacations and off work time are to be protected, for health reasons), there are discussions in Europe about introducing new regulations which would make any such "off work work" paid overtime, by law - effectively making it financially interesting for companies to prevent emails from reaching their employees when they are off work. This Daimler story is just one example of that.

Comment Re:3dTV is a flop? (Score 2) 197

Then why do all the TVs over 50 inches include it?

Included =/= being used. My TV is 3D capable, yet I never use that feature, because I consider it to be a gimmick. If there had been a cheaper version of my TV without 3D capability, I would have bought that one (same for all the "smart TV" Internet features, btw - all I want is a huge display with a couple HDMI inputs...). Sadly, that option did not exist. My totally unscientific research among friends/relatives shows that if they have a 3D TV, at most it has been used for one or two 3D movies like Ice Age "for the kids" to try it out, and that's it.

Comment No. (Score 1) 381

The smart watches, as they are being offered right now, do not interest me at all. They look ridiculous, the battery life is horrible and they are not good at being WATCHES.

A "smart watch" which would interest me would have some or all of these features:

- looks like a normal, elegant watch - i.e. leather or steel wristband (NO plastic!), round, not too heavy, elegant design (either like a standard chronograph or some "bauhaus"-y look). Basically nothing which screams "I am a geek".
- long battery life. By that, I mean AT LEAST a week, better a month or more.
- maybe health monitoring features (pulse, steps, ...)
- shows time without having to be "activated" (i.e. no having to touch the screen or hit a button to show something)
- best "display" option for battery life would be standard hour/minute dials plus a tiny little LCD screen for text (a line or two)
- possibility to link to a smartphone to show notifications (e-mail subject lines, sms), but nothing more, since tft/amoled screens plus touchscreen features plus voice recognition plus apps mean low battery life, so it's simply a no-no. Basically, I just want to have a look at the watch to see if it is worth taking out my smartphone to read the e-mail which just arrived or not. I do not want to actually read the e-mail or type a reply or make a phone call via the watch. Especially NOT make a phone call. Holding your watch up to your face and talking to it might look cool in some old James Bond movie, but in reality it is just stupid.

something which is kind of there, except for the little LCD display for notifications, is the Withings Activité:

http://www.withings.com/activi...

Looks like a standard, expensive watch. Has health monitoring which can send data to an app on your smartphone. Has a battery life of A YEAR with a standard CR2025 battery, despite low energy bluetooth connectivity to the smartphone.

Comment Re:Buyer's Remorse (Score 1) 140

That doesn't sound like something that happens a lot. Do you always make decisions based on extreme events?

It happens a lot here in Germany, people ordering e.g. clothing (several trousers, shirt, etc.) and only keeping the ones they like, sending the rest back again. It really is pretty common, people use the right to return merchandise bought online as a replacement for trying out various items at a shop. A big reason for that is that until yesterday, the SELLER had to pay postage for the returns, so there was no penalty for the buyer if he ordered more than he actually needed. Guess we will see soon if the new law (buyer has to pay for the return shipping) servers as a deterrent. For the same reason, it was also not unusual for people to order e.g. a digital camera, use it for a week (e.g. to take photos at a wedding/birthday/...) and then send it back for free. I remember reading reports about Amazon, Zalando (another big online shop in Germany) etc. "throwing out" customers because of a return rate which was too high. E.g. here is a thread (in German) in which customers discuss this, and their general opinion seems to be "I order x items and return half of them, that's normal because I want to try out": http://forum.glamour.de/thread...

Another thin - I always wondered why even items which usually are not returnable for hygienic reasons (e.g. underwear, towels, stuff like that) ARE returnable when bought online. There was a TV documentary a while ago on German TV in which online shops explained why the return rights hurt them a lot - online shops for electronics etc. can just restock the stuff, maybe at a reduced price if it already has been opened, but items like underwear etc. CANNOT be restocked, they (by law) have to be thrown away. So it really makes not much sense for an online shop to sell stuff like that if it is so easy for customers to return the items - the shop has to pay for postage AND loses the money for the items because they cannot be sold again.

Comment Re:Cherry Pick Stats (Score 1) 411

My spouses 4S is working just fine with 7.1. Since 8 is not going to have a greater overhead in it's basic operations, there's no reason not to make it available to any phone that can run the current IOS.

I do not understand your problem. The 4S WILL get iOS 8. Like the parent posters wrote, only the 4 (non-S) won't receive the update.

Comment Re:The difference with the USA (Score 2) 80

...is that Germany is much closer to being a true and functioning democracy. I don't see how this would come through the Bundestag, the German parliament, without being at least watered down, viz. being quietly forced into starvation as soon as a left-leaning government comes into power.

Nope, it will be as usual.

"Diplomacy" is absolutely necessary (all governments know that the others are spying, too, which is important for secret behind-the-scenes deals, so nobody can just STOP spying just because the masses are against it). The spying will go on, while the politicians - in public - will claim to be against it. So when the next Snowden shows up and publishes proof that spying indeed DOES happen, the politicians can claim to not have known about it, some heads will roll, the politicians will promise that something like this will never happen again, while secretly handing over more money to fund BETTER spying.

Comment Re:Game fairness (Score 1) 252

If I want to play the game with cheats that's my fucking business.

It's not if you cheat in multiplayer games against other Blizzard customers and ruin their fun, because then it causes financial losses for Blizzard (if those other customers decide not to buy another Blizzard product because of their bad playing experience).

If you want to use cheats in single player games, that's perfectly fine (and you do not need to buy a cheat tool for that anyway, Blizzard thoughtfully already provides cheat codes for that).

Slashdot Top Deals

Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers. -- Leonard Brandwein

Working...